This ISA basically completely dominated the smartphone market of the 2010s and beyond, but it started appearing in other areas as the end of Moore's law made it more economical logical for large companies to start developing their own semiconductor, e.g. Google custom silicon, Amazon custom silicon.
It is exciting to see ARM entering the server, desktop and supercomputer market circa 2020, beyond its dominant mobile position and roots.
Ciro Santilli likes to see the underdogs rise, and bite off dominant ones.
Basically, as long as were a huge company seeking to develop a CPU and able to control your own ecosystem independently of Windows' desktop domination (held by the need for backward compatibility with a billion end user programs), ARM would be a possibility on your mind.
- in 2020, the Fugaku supercomputer, which uses an ARM-based Fujitsu designed chip, because the number 1 fastest supercomputer in TOP500: www.top500.org/lists/top500/2021/11/It was later beaten by another x86 supercomputer www.top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/, but the message was clearly heard.
- 2012 hackaday.com/2012/07/09/pedal-powered-32-core-arm-linux-server/ pedal-powered 32-core Arm Linux server. A publicity stunt, but still, cool.
- AWS Graviton
The leading no-royalties options as of 2020.
China has been a major RISC-V potential user in the late 2010s, since the country is trying to increase its semiconductor industry independence, especially given economic sanctions imposed by the USA.
E.g. a result of this, the RISC-V Foundation moved its legal headquarters to Switzerland in 2019 to try and overcome some of the sanctions.
Leading RISC-V consultants as of 2020, they are basically trying to become the Red Hat of the semiconductor industry.
TODO: the interrupt is firing only once:
Adapted from: danielmangum.com/posts/risc-v-bytes-timer-interrupts/
Tested on Ubuntu 23.10:Then on shell 1:and on shell 2:GDB should break infinitel many times on
sudo apt install binutils-riscv64-unknown-elf qemu-system-misc gdb-multiarch
cd riscv
makeqemu-system-riscv64 -machine virt -cpu rv64 -smp 1 -s -S -nographic -bios none -kernel timer.elfgdb-multiarch timer.elf -nh -ex "target remote :1234" -ex 'display /i $pc' -ex 'break *mtrap' -ex 'display *0x2004000' -ex 'display *0x200BFF8'mtrap as interrupts happen.This tutorial explains the very basics of how paging works, with focus on x86, although most high level concepts will also apply to other instruction set architectures, e.g. ARM.
The goals are to:
This tutorial was extracted and expanded from this Stack Overflow answer.
Minimal example: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples/blob/5c672f73884a487414b3e21bd9e579c67cd77621/paging.S
Like everything else in programming, the only way to really understand this is to play with minimal examples.
Although it is impossible to understand without examples in mind, try to get familiar with the manuals as soon as possible.
Intel describes paging in the Intel Manual Volume 3 System Programming Guide - 325384-056US September 2015 Chapter 4 "Paging".
Specially interesting is Figure 4-4 "Formats of CR3 and Paging-Structure Entries with 32-Bit Paging", which gives the key data structures.
Paging makes it easier to compile and run two programs or threads at the same time on a single computer.
For example, when you compile two programs, the compiler does not know if they are going to be running at the same time or not.
And thread stacks, that must be contiguous and keep growing down until they overwrite each other, are an even bigger issue!
But if two programs use the same address and run at the same time, this is obviously going to break them!
Paging solves this problem beautifully by adding one degree of indirection:
(logical) ------------> (physical)
pagingWhere:
As far as programs are concerned, they think they can use any address between 0 and 4 GiB (2^32,
FFFFFFFF) on 32-bit systems.The OS then sets up paging so that identical logical addresses will go into different physical addresses and not overwrite each other.
This makes it much simpler to compile programs and run them at the same time.
Paging achieves that goal, and in addition:
- the switch between programs is very fast, because it is implemented by hardware
- the memory of both programs can grow and shrink as needed without too much fragmentation
- one program can never access the memory of another program, even if it wanted to.This is good both for security, and to prevent bugs in one program from crashing other programs.
Or if you like non-funny jokes:
Comparison between the Linux kernel userland memory virtualization and The Matrix
. Source. Is this RAM real?Paging is implemented by the CPU hardware itself.
Paging could be implemented in software, but that would be too slow, because every single RAM memory access uses it!
Operating systems must setup and control paging by communicating to the CPU hardware. This is done mostly via:
- the CR3 register, which tells the CPU where the page table is in RAM memory
- writing the correct paging data structures to the RAM pointed to the CR3 register.Using RAM data structures is a common technique when lots of data must be transmitted to the CPU as it would cost too much to have such a large CPU register.The format of the configuration data structures is fixed by the hardware, but it is up to the OS to set up and manage those data structures on RAM correctly, and to tell the hardware where to find them (via
cr3).Then some heavy caching is done to ensure that the RAM access will be fast, in particular using the TLB.Another notable example of RAM data structure used by the CPU is the IDT which sets up interrupt handlers. - CR3 cannot be modified in ring 3. The OS runs in ring 0. See also:
- the page table structures are made invisible to the process using paging itself!
Processes can however make requests to the OS that cause the page tables to be modified, notably:
- stack size changes
brkandmmapcalls, see also: stackoverflow.com/questions/6988487/what-does-brk-system-call-do/31082353#31082353
The kernel then decides if the request will be granted or not in a controlled manner.
In x86 systems, there may actually be 2 address translation steps:like this:
- first segmentation
- then paging
(logical) ------------------> (linear) ------------> (physical)
segmentation pagingThe major difference between paging and segmentation is that:
- paging splits RAM into equal sized chunks called pages
- segmentation splits memory into chunks of arbitrary sizes
This is the main advantage of paging, since equal sized chunks make things more manageable by reducing memory fragmentation problems. See also:
Paging came after segmentation historically, and largely replaced it for the implementation of virtual memory in modern OSs.
Paging has become so much more popular that support for segmentation was dropped in x86-64 in 64-bit mode, the main mode of operation for new software, where it only exists in compatibility mode, which emulates IA-32.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact